Eggs

This may look like another puffball fungus, but it’s not. It’s actually the empty shell of a Black Rat Snake egg. I seem to see more of these every year.

If it weren’t for predators digging out the eggs, I would never find any of these nests.

There were eight egg shells left at the scene. Normally there are more than this. It’s possible that some were carried away for consumption elsewhere or this could be the clutch of a young snake.

It looked like the eggs had hatched normally, so I’m hoping some of the young snakes got away. It seems to be at hatching time that the eggs and young are most vulnerable. I suppose it would be easy for an alert predator to detect the aroma of emerging hatchlings.

Snake eggs can be very similar in appearance to some turtle eggs. The best way to determine egg type is to examine the hole in which they were laid. Turtles excavate a new chamber for the clutch of eggs, so the hole would end in a wider chamber without any other exit. Snakes lay their eggs inside existing animal burrows, such as those from chipmunks or moles. When I investigated this hole, I found a tunnel leading away in opposite directions. I fed in a long grass stem and it finally emerged at the entrance to the burrow, marked here by my knife.

I suppose the snake would go ahead and eat any small animals it happened to find in the burrow. This would help to protect the eggs from any rodent damage.

As though it had been left as a territorial marker, I found a wad of shed snake skin beside the entrance to the burrow. My hope is that one day I’ll be the one to find a clutch of snake eggs just as they are hatching.

More Egg Shells

A few weeks ago, I talked about a nest of scattered egg shells that I thought belonged to a snake. Now I’ve found a similar, and much fresher, nest about 200 feet from the first. This nest seems to have been exposed by a running deer and then superficially investigated by some other predator. A snake nest now seems even more likely.

I think this nest successfully hatched before it was exposed. All of the eggs bore these same slits that are similar to what I’ve seen in several snake species.

A lot of the eggs were still buried and were fully hydrated like the egg to this right in this shot. The egg to the left was dried and shrunken like the eggs from the first nest.

You can see the shape of the deer hoof that pushed through into the animal burrow and threw out some eggs shells. The burrow itself resembled an abandoned mole tunnel. I wonder if the snake was eating the mole as it laid its eggs.

The eggs within the animal burrow spanned a distance of about 12 inches. I probed both directions in the tunnel and pulled out all remaining egg shells. The total clutch was at least 28 eggs. I may have to start calling this place Snake Knob.

Egg Shells

The reptiles must be doing well at Blue Jay Barrens. I’m constantly finding egg shells excavated from subterranean nests. Most of the nests are those of Eastern Box Turtles and, from a distance, I thought this shell had come from one of those nests.

But, there were too many shells for this to be a box turtle nest. Then I thought of the baby snapping turtle I found earlier and suspected this could be a snapper nest.

Snapping Turtle was ruled out when I discovered that the shells had been unearthed from an animal burrow running horizontally just beneath the soil surface. Snakes, especially Black Rat Snakes, like to lay their eggs in old burrows such as this, so these could be snake eggs.

I’ve not had much experience with native snake eggs, so it’s hard for me to make an exact guess at what species these eggs represent. The shape seems more ovoid than spherical. The condition of the shell suggests that they were hatched rather than opened by a predator. They also seemed old and may be a clutch that hatched last year and was only recently exposed.